Ah, I’d missed this bit

I meet Steve near the station in the Wiltshire town of Bradford-on-Avon, from where we’re taking a nine-mile countryside walk to Bath Spa station.

That’s, actually, a cracking, cracking, walk. Recommend it to anyone.

They’ve done it a bit weirdly. You can just follow the canal (Kennet and Avon) and go around the hill (Combe and Claverton Downs) and come into Bath through Sydney Buildings and Sydney Gardens. Or you can go canal, then the old Somerset and Dorset line – they’re reopened the twin tunnels which take you under Combe Down and bring you out some 100 yards from where both Simon Gardiner and I grew up (SG is also Bloke in Bilbao, one of life’s oddities is that while we don’t in fact know each other, being of sufficiently different ages that we wouldn’t, we grew up in the houses next door to each other – we’ve met purely through this site). But they’ve gone along the canal and then up over Combe Down to then come down through the National Trust land above Widcombe-ish, below Rainbow Woods, round by Prior Park etc. A grand view down into Bath that way, but getting up Combe Down is a slog – yes, I have done it.

We pass through pretty limestone villages with old-world names – Avoncliff, Limpley Stoke, Monkton Combe

Avoncliff has stopping station – you put your hand out to get the Weymouth (??) to Bath train to stop for you. Conveniently there’s a pub with a garden with a long enough view down the valley that you can sink the last of the pint and get to the platform when you see the train acomin’. That’s for if the walk is getting a bit too much for you. Or, that route through the tunnel takes you by Midford and a small jaunt from there to Combe Hay – that little stretch being, in my view, one of the truly gorgeous little encapsulations of what we all dream the English countryside should be like.

There’s also a little spot along there. Where you can, just about and with a tad of squinting, see the transport history of humanity. Way over there’s Solsbury Hill and the motorway link road – very modern that. Closers is the GWR line to London. Below you in the little valley the Weymouth line. The local roads are very rural, definitely cart tracks now paved. And there’s the KandA canal, going all the way to London. And the Avon, of course. But also that much more local Somerset Coal Canal, rounding out pretty much that entire history of transport. All visible from that one spot. Even, just by there, the aqueduct taking the canal over the river valley, which is itself crosed by the viaduct taking the old S&D line over the canal…..if I’m not inventing things by now….